For such a seemingly minor detail, the Instagram hashtag is remarkably powerful. Anecdotally, the hashtag has long appeared to lead to a flood of "likes' from fellow Instagram users. Now there's data to prove it.

By analyzing over 1 million Instagram photos, self-described social media scientist Dan Zarrella found a strong correlation between hashtags and likes. The more you tag your photos, the more likely you are get a virtual hat tip from your fellow Instagrammers. 

(See also: Instagram Now Lets You Tag Friends, Brands and Selfies)

How Instagram Hashtags Work

As the contextual connective tissue that ties related images together, hashtags grease the wheels of photo discovery and get your pouty-faced mirror selfies and vintage-tinted lattes seen by more people. That exposure, in turn, results in more taps of the "like" button.

If you've ever taken the time to go back and tag your older photos, you've seen this in action: one after another, a parade of strangers will instantly start tapping the heart-shaped 'like' button under the image, sending a flood of virtual love your way. 

Of course, the results will vary depending on which hashtags are used. Super-popular tags like #love, #me, #cute and #instagood are naturally going to lead to more exposure, simply by virtue of the fact that those tags are popping up all over Instagram and a higher volume of people will wind up tapping on them. 

Driving Photo Discovery on Instagram

Along with geolocation tag pages, the pages for individual hashtags are one of the few areas of Instagram that let you break out of your own immediate network and peruse photos you wouldn't otherwise see. When you add a given hashtag to your photo, the image winds up on that tag's page, where it's seen by hordes of new people. Since most tags are at least somewhat descriptive, the images one finds by tapping on them are more contextually relevant than, say, the tween selfies and cat pics found on the app's Explore tab. That relevancy is what drives so many of those likes. 

Of course, like everything on the Internet, Instagram hashtags can be gamed for self-promotional purposes. Tags like #followforfollow, #like4like and #followback are used quite frequently as a sort of logrolling currency. If you like my photo, I'll like one of yours or better yet, I'll follow you.

Tactics like this might seem a little slimy, but they're incredibly effective, accordion Zarrella's data. The 11 top tags that garner the most likes seek some kind of reciprocal behavior. Nature-related tags like #sky #clouds #sunset and #nature are also highly correlated with frequent taps of the "like" button. 

See Also: 

• How To Get More Followers On Instagram
• Top 10 Most Popular Tags On Instagram
• When Is The Best Time To Post On Instagram?
• #Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie

If you've got a lot of selfies, your tapping finger is in for a major workout. Today, Instagram pushed version 3.5 of its app to the iOS App Store and Google Play — and it's a big one for brands and users alike. 

Instagram 3.5 adds the ability to tag other Instagrammers in the photos you take. Unlike Facebook, where photo tagging has been routine for years, Instagram devotees have relied on a bare-bones system of @tags in the comments section below photos to give other users the heads-up that a given image is relevant to them.

I asked an Instagram rep if the new tagging feature is a play for making more money off mobile use — a revenue stream Facebook has square in its crosshairs. The company denies it: "At this time Instagram isn’t focused on monetization. [Instagram] rolled out this new feature because it was a missing piece to let people tell their stories... and to make it easier to add people and things to photos."

According to Instagram's business blog:

Photos of You also gives people a new way to explore photos of your business or brand. People can now add their favorite band to their concert photos from last night, the clothing brand they’re currently wearing or the coffee roaster who brews their morning cup of coffee. As a business or brand, Photos of You gives you a new way to curate and share the photos that best showcase your brand your brand[sic] as documented by your biggest fans.

Instagram's Biggest Update In, Well, As Long As We Can Remember 

Instagram hasn't made many major overhauls to its winning formula since launching in October 2010. Over the course of the last year, the app has trickled in a few new photo filters, a map view and a web interface, but not too much has changed — even after the great Instagram ToS debacle of last December.

Considering the level of loyalty that the company enjoys — particularly when compared to peers like its oft-disdained parent company — not tinkering with its recipe is smart. But, happily, so is this update.

Since version 3.5 was a simultaneous launch across platforms, Android and iPhone users eager to get their tag on can download the new app now. Update 3.5 also boasts improvements to image quality for photos uploaded on Android 4.0 and above (a relief for any Instagrammers who wonder why those Android photos never look quite right). 

Once you've got it downloaded, a pop-up will point to the new section, which lives on the far-right profile button (click the little image that looks like a driver's license).

In the profile view, you'll be greeted with a very Facebook-like silhouette of a person, again on the far right. This "photos of you" section compiles exactly that, though it will remain private until May 16 to give you time to pick your best selfie angles and curate accordingly. 

Why Brands Should Be Taking Notes

While other recent feature tweaks haven't shaken things up too much for Instagram, version 3.5 has all the trappings of a game-changer. Users will be pleased to have photos taken of them heaped into one neat little memory pile, while brands should be thrilled with their higher visibility on the young advertising platform. With photo tagging enabled, Instagram's platform should provide some unique perspectives on brand reach and the demographics of who is engaging and why. 

Plenty of brands have launched heavy-handed hashtag campaigns in an effort to figure out what makes Instagram users — ahem, potential customers — tick. Now, with the tagging feature, Instagram users will have a natural incentive to tag not just the "who", but the "what" and "where," too. Which should, in turn, spur more businesses to rev up their Instagramming.

But just remember, brands: Keep it real. An awkward hashtag is a fate worse than a grainy, Hefe-filtered selfie.

When it comes to Wi-Fi and mobile broadband service, population makes a big difference. According to a new report from WeFi, a mobile broadband solution and network management company, the higher the population a state has, the better that state's Wi-Fi speeds - but the slower the cellular broadband speeds. (Ironically, states with very low population densities also suffer from slow cellular speeds - probably for completely different reasons.)

The infographic below lays out the report's conclusions on who in the U.S. gets the fastest and slowest Wi-Fi and mobile broadband speeds - and exactly what they use all that bandwidth to do.

For example, it turns out that Instagram is the biggest social-network data hog, easily beating out Google+ and Facebook and trailing only multimedia-heavy ESPN in terms of overall data downloaded.  

If you're still mourning the death of the Polaroid camera, cheer up - your favorite bit of retro technology is being reinvented for 2014. A company called Socialmatic just reached a deal to launch a line of Polaroid-branded instant digital cameras next year - and it's playing up the natural intersection of Instagram and retro instant photography. 

The concept design makes the camera resemble one big Instagram logo - without the word "Instagram." There's a screen around back for editing and adding photo filters and a little slot on the side that actually prints your Insta-masterworks. The camera, to be manufactured by Polaroid partner C&A Marketing, will sport a 4.3-inch screen, Wi-Fi and 3G mobile broadband support, as well as 16GB of expandable photo storage, though the rest of the details are scarce. For more photos, you can check out Socialmatic's image gallery.

Even if the finished product (and mock-up) are a little silly, the idea sure beats Polaroid's other recent bid for relevance, which was an absurd plan to open branded brick-and-mortar photo printing stores.

Socialmatic might have an uphill battle cozying up with Instagram enough to use its logo on the project, but my fingers are crossed for anything that can bring the Instagram era full circle - and back to its humble, instant printing roots. 

Images courtesy of Socialmatic.

Well, that was fast. Almost a year after announcing that it had 27 million users, Instagram has surpassed the 100-million-user milestone, according to the company's blog. Over the last year, Instagram has continued to refine its already polished app, adding new filters and a Web feed for viewing photos in a browser rather than on a mobile device. 

The service remains well-loved among existing users even as it chases new soon to be Insta-addicts. As much as its users have worried that Facebook will meddle with its photo-sharing darling, Instagram likely has Zuck and deep Facebook News Feed integration to thank for its threefold growth in the last year.

Instagram only seems to get better with age. Last December, Instagram successfully defused a minor revolt over changes to its terms of service, suggesting that even under the wing of Facebook, the company remains nimble and autonomous. 

Image courtesy of Instagram.

Well, that's it folks. It's all over. Instagram has come to the web - and not just via static web profiles like the company introduced last year.

No, Instagram is on the web now. It's a full blown web-based social network with a companion app. Forgive me while I totally freak out for a minute over here.

This is what I've been afraid of. 

For Instagram, The Rules Were Different

Instagram is special. It's why we Instagram acolytes almost start a holy war every time Facebook so much as looks at its billion-dollar acquisition. But what makes Instagram so different? The app has a lot going for it, sure. The interface is lovely, with both social networking and social discovery built right in. But that's not it.

The thing that makes Instagram special is that - until today - it was a social network with no web presence. There's an inestimable charm to how Instagram feels walled-off in its mobile-only realm.  You just don't interact with Instagram on desktop. The rules are different. It's like when the power goes out and you have to play board games. And it's really, really fun. 

Mobile-Only: The Final Frontier Of Play

Look at how (and why) we love to hate Facebook. As a social network, Facebook is woven into the fabric of our workday lives - namely we use it on on our desktop computers when we're supposed to be doing something else entirely. That fact makes a site like Facebook feel less like play and more like a professional tic. A social network with a ubiquitous presence across platforms becomes something we shove into every micromoment of the workday - and most of those happen while we're zoning out sitting at a desk.

Instagram wasn't like that - it was serendipitous and social and creative in turns. But that may have all just changed. Now, in every inbox lull and pre-meeting chunk of lagtime, we'll open a new tab and feel the tug - why not just check Instagram? 

The Unbearable Lightness Of Instagram

There's a heaviness to all of this attentional straying. It's the dopamine surge that lures us back to places like the Facebook News Feed, even though we know that little pleasure spike in our brain is as empty as it is ephemeral. Then we're back to the unshakeable guilt of what we were abandoned when we wandered off the trail. 

Mobile is monomaniacal — even with Android's multitasking and iOS's relatively nascent notification center and fast app switching, we pick a portal and enter into it. But on a computer, we partition our screen off into hostile factions warring for our attention - and we never seem to be on the winning side. But on mobile, choosing to open Instagram is just that: a choice and not a tic. 

Instagram is meant to be us at play, capturing the world and parceling it back out to our friends who are out there doing just the same. For Instagram, mobile is more than just a platform. It's a mindset.

Sure, Instagram's web feed will boost engagement and provide new opportunities for monetization and so on. But it could prove to be a major paradigm shift for the kind of unconditional positive regard that the company has enjoyed to date. 

We'll soon be wallowing in our newly compounded web ennui, scrolling back through our web feeds to remember what the good ol' days were like, way back when Instagram was still fun. 

Remember?

Those of us who use Instagram everyday like to think of it in glowing terms. Not only is it a rapidly-growing social media success story, but it's a place where we can go to see gorgeous, often creatively composed imagery. Our friends are there, documenting their world for us and reliably tapping the Like button every time we share our own photos. It's awesome.

That is, until you take a step back and look around

As it turns out, Instagram is a breeding ground for many people's most narcissistic tendencies. It's a reality that comes into sharp focus as soon as you step outside of your circle of friends and look at what everybody else is posting. Turns out that as a group, Instagrammers are a pretty self-absorbed bunch. 

Sure, you might say, we knew this. Mirror-shot, pouty-faced self portraits of teenagers find their way to the "Popular" (now called "Explore") tab as often as sunsets, celebs and food pics. But Instagram narcissism is more than a stereotype. There's actually data to back it up. 

90 Million Selfies... And Counting

Consider this: The third most frequently used hashtag on Instagram is #me. Under it, you'll find more than 90 million self-portraits taken primarily by younger users, very few of them with any irony, or even much creativity. 

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with publishing self portraits. After all, your appearance is very significant part of the life you're documenting using social services like Instagram. Taken tastefully and periodically, the "selfie" can add personality and context to your never-ending streams of lattes, power lines, cats and skylines. And sure, just like in the real world, our brains love the ego boost we get from the compliments. 

Scrolling through the #me photos, you see images of varying quality, all displaying faces of different people. In a way, it's kind of fascinating to peruse. Here are all these people, broadcasting their own faces to the world. In one photo, you'll see an American kid with his collar popped and earbuds in, probably shirking some school-related responsibility. In the next, there's a Saudi Arabian man dressed in a traditional gutra headdress, snapping a self-portrait in the mirror. Some people have new haircuts. Some have new babies. One guy has several large nuggets of marijuana.  

Some of these images feel a little too intimate. As you scroll through, you start to get the feeling that you're peeking through a window of a world you're not quite supposed to have access to. But mobile and social technology have given us millions of little windows into the worlds of others, so we keep scrolling.

The stream exposes nothing explicit, but it's peppered with what feels like far too many young, teenage girls laying in bed. Or 15-year-old boys standing shirtless in front of a mirror. Some of these kids are showing skin. Just about all of them - male and female alike - are seeking some kind of approval from their peers and the larger community, which thanks to the Internet, is now effectively infinite.

The Rise Of The Narcissistic Social Media Star

Some are getting the approval they're seeking in a big way. Michael Saba is a 15-year-old from Boca Raton, Florida, whose Instagram photos often find their way to the app's Explore tab among teen pop stars, professional athletes and professional photographers. But despite his 45,000 followers and hordes of teenage fans, Saba is not a celebrity. He is, as his Instagram profile says, "just a kid who takes pictures." 

Saba's photo stream is comprised entirely of self-portraits, each one garnering between three and five thousand likes and hundreds of comments, mostly from adoring teenage girls who fawn over Saba with almost Bieber-esque intensity - and shower him in heart-shaped Emojis. The pictures are not particularly interesting or varied. It's just him, in similar-looking outfits, day after day. Sometimes in the mirror, sometimes making well-rehearsed "cute" faces directly into his phone's camera. Quite often, Saba poses with two other friends, also heartthrobs. Every photo is a massive hit. Meanwhile, he follows only one other user. 

In our weird new world, it's not uncommon for young people to achieve this new type of psuedo-fame, fueled solely by social media. And we're not just talking the type of notoriety you can get from a viral YouTube video, which tends to require at least a sliver of talent, humor or skill. Instead, these kids are amassing huge followings just for being attractive. It's like a high school popularity contest on digital steroids, but this homeroom has more than 45,000 kids in it. 

Instagram And Self Image: Is The Impact Good Or Bad? 

Is this necessarily a bad thing? One has to wonder what this kind of existence must do to the ego of a 15-year-old kid. Or the weird new social dynamics it could produce at school. But some psychologists think that the self-image boosts offered by social networks like Instagram could be a good thing. 

It used to be that most of the photographs of other people we encountered were carefully crafted images of the flawless-looking individuals portrayed in popular media and advertising. Psychologists have long had concerns about the distorted effect that's had on normal-looking people's self images. Instagram and mobile photography more generally may be changing that. 

"I like to think that Instagram offers a quiet resistance to the barrage of perfect images that we face each day," writes Sarah J. Gervais in Psychology Today. "Rather than being bombarded with those creations… we can look through our Instagram feed and see images of real people – with beautiful diversity." 

Of course, as Gervais acknowledges, there hasn't yet been much research into what sort of impact Instagram in particular is having on self image or anything else. Indeed, when I reached out to Microsoft's Danah Boyd and several other academics who study social media and its affect on society, I wasn't able to turn up much. 

The psychological impact of technology more generally has been a popular topic for a few years now. Narcissistic personality disorder has been on the rise for 20 years, according to a paper coauthored by Dr. Larry Rosen, who also wrote a book called iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold On Us. 

Some research suggests a correlation between social media and narcissism, but the condition's increase long predates the rise of smartphones, says Jean Twenge, a researcher at San Diego State University who studies issues related to social media.  

"It's probably both that higher narcissism causes people to use social media in narcissistic ways, and that some social media causes higher narcissism," says Twenge. "But it's definitely a two-way street."

The Instagram hashtag can be a pretty powerful thing. 

As with other social platforms, tags are used on Instagram for descriptive purposes, typically appending a caption with words that are relevant to the image's content. Look, my cat is swatting at a turkey sandwich. #cat #cute #sandwich #slap #food #lol. Pretty standard stuff, right? 

See Also: #Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie

Instagram hashtags can also be surprisingly effective in fueling content discovery, helping users get more exposure for the photos they take. Tagging images with the right terms at the right time can also lead to an uptick of likes and new followers. 

So what are the most popular tags?

It changes over time, and it can actually be interesting to watch trends spike and then fall out of favor on Instagram. In June, #tweegram was the third most-popular tag, but has since slid down the list to number 16. #summer is no longer in the top 10, for obvious reasons. The hashtag #me has grown more popular in the last seven months, suggesting that Instagrammers may be getting even more narcissistic than they already were. 

While some tags fluctuate, others remain popular over time. Tags like #love and #cute are among the most frequently used, while people evidently haven't gotten sick of tagging things with #photooftheday. 

If you were expecting #cats, #powerlines or #food to break the top ten, you may be in for a surprise. 

10. #girl

Photo by fashionstyleparison. 

9. #picoftheday

Photo by krad1469 

8. #beautiful

Photo by emmafudd72.

7. #instamood

Photo by mordyisrael. 

6. #photooftheday

Photo by tomwebstax.

5. #tbt  (Throwback Thursday)

Photo by justlikenonna. 

4. #cute

Photo by snoreborewhoree. 

3. #me

Photo by jonasbarcellos.

2. #instagood

Photo by wait4it.

1. #love

Photo by koolmello.

In rolling out its new Graph Search, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quick to caution that "it's going to take years to index the whole map of the graph."  That's great.  It gives me time to completely remove myself from Facebook.

When I dropped off Facebook a few weeks ago, it wasn't in pursuit of some grand, moral crusade.  I was simply trying to show solidarity with my 13-year old son, who had become obsessed (addicted?) to a massively multiplayer game played on Facebook. When I took away his Facebook privileges in an attempt to help him kick the habit, I decided that a hiatus from Facebook would do me some good, too, and would show him that I wasn't asking him to give up something that I, too, wasn't willing to abandon.  

Little did I suspect the incredible relief that would come from cutting out Facebook and Instagram from my life. (I kept Twitter, however, as it has become a useful business tool for me.)

At the same time, to keep myself from slavishly staring at my iPhone all the time - again, not wanting to be a bad example for my son - I turned off all notifications. Then I did the same thing on my laptop. I wasn't attempting a Digital Purge, as John Paul Titlow describes in ReadWrite: I simply wanted to control how and when I'd use my devices and their applications, rather than having them constantly clamoring for my attention. I wanted control.

Peace At Last

It has been amazing.  I've felt more peaceful and thoughtful than I have in years. (Regular readers of my column here may disagree, but we'll bracket that issue for now.)

This reprieve from the onslaught of social media and its attendant army of notifications ("Lonn likes your post.  He really likes it!") couldn't have come at a better time, now that Facebook's Graph Search is set to make it even easier for random people that I've accepted as "friends" to search my interests and take action based on them. ("Hey! I like The Hobbit, too! Want to go to the community theatre's production of Bilbo and Me?" "You've eaten at Flour + Water. What should I get?")

Facebook was noisy before. Now it's going to be nosy, too? No, thanks.

Jon Mitchell is right: we need a unified search box, not a Facebook or Google or Apple walled-garden search experience. Google comes closest to this, but of course Facebook has siloed its "graph" such that Google can't index it. That may be great for Facebook's business, but it's terrible for the user experience.  

Having said that, if I have to let people scour my random postings across social media, I'd prefer them to be my friends. I just wish Facebook more accurately reflected who those friends actually are. We can't manage more than 150 friends meaningfully, at least, according to Robin Dunbar's influential research.  

I must be slow, as I don't even want to interact with those 150 friends when it comes to choosing a restaurant or a movie. There are few individuals that I trust on such matters: I either want an expert (Zagat) or the foolishness of crowds (Yelp). I don't want my brother, who might hype me on the new dish at Olive Garden. (A fate worse than death!)

In sum, I'm enjoying my life sans Facebook, and I imagine I'll enjoy it even more now that Facebook wants to make it even easier to invade my personal space without real value in return. Maybe it will be useful for dating, but I have zero interest in this.

I just want a place to hang out with real friends. It turns out that there's an even better place to do this than Facebook. It's called "the real world."

Nostalgia for Polaroid's iconic instant photos may have very well sparked the photo sharing craze that brought us Instagram, and now things have come full circle - sort of. Polaroid plans to launch 10 retail stores in 2013 that exist with the sole intent of printing your Instagram photos for you. You can print any kind of digital photo in the stores, of course, but Polaroid is mostly angling to tap into the boundless enthusiasm of the Instagram crowd. 

Polaroid's (awkwardly-named) "Fotobars" will be manned by (yet-more-awkwardly-named) "Fototenders" who can presumably help you edit, crop, and tinker with your digital creations to your heart's content. The stores look ripped right out of Apple's retail playbook, right down to the sparse white countertops at the Genius Bar... er, Fotobar.

Look familiar?

The catch? Unlike the camera that made Polaroid a household name, you won't have your photos instantly - in fact, you'll be waiting up to a few days. According to Polaroid, "All products created by consumers at Polaroid Fotobar retail stores... are handcrafted and shipped from the company’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility within 72 hours." 

The Polaroid camera, invented by the company's co-founder Edwin Land, first went on sale in 1948. He reportedly dreamt up the notion of an instant camera in 1944 after his daughter famously asked "Why can't I see the picture now?" after her father snapped a portrait of the three-year-old with his twin lens Rolleiflex.

Our thoughts exactly. 

Photo courtesy of Alexander Norman via Flickr

From political uprisings to billion-dollar acquisitions, social media packed a bigger punch in 2012 than ever before. While that comes as no surprise considering that social is still snaking its way into every nook and cranny of our lives, it was a pretty fascinating year viewed through the lens of online networks that connect people the world over.

1. January 18, 2012: The Web Goes Dark To Halt SOPA

Future politicians take note: you do not want to be the target of the Web's collective fury. To raise visibility for the cause against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and its companion bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), social sites the web over blinked out in protest. Reddit, Tumblr and countless other sites went dark while the ones that stayed online were lit up with sentiment in opposition to the pieces of legislation, which was then delayed indefinitely.

2. May 18, 2012: Facebook Goes Public

In May, Facebook held its initial public offering, placing its value square in the hands of the masses. Opening at $38 a share with a valuation of $104.2 billion, Facebook's IPO was the third biggest in U.S. history and the biggest ever for a tech company. The company's stock dipped considerably thereafter, but has been inching upward as investors and users alike try to figure out how exactly to make sense of a social network in the stock market.

3. April 2012: Facebook Buys Instagram To The Tune Of $1 Billion

Speaking of billions, in April Facebook bought social photo sharing app Instagram for $1 billion -- the social giant's biggest acquisition to date. As the Web squabbles over how much the app is really worth (sound familiar?), Facebook neutralizes a threat and boosts its image by gobbling up one of the best-loved apps around... and promising not to mess it up.

4. April 2012: Pinterest Swells To #3 Most Visited Social Site

Pinterest surprised everyone in 2012 when it ascended to the third most-visited social network on the web, trailing only Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest's explosion may not have lasting power, but with a (very) disproportionately female user base, its rise has big implications for both e-commerce and the fairer's sex's swagger on social networks. 

5. August 6, 2012: Curiosity Rover Lands On Mars As The World Looks On

The world collectively held its breath when NASA took to social channels to stream the touchdown of the Mars rover Curiosity. The high-stakes, $2.5 billion interplanetary recon mission landed with a perfect 10, announcing its safe arrival on the planet to the Twittersphere. The rover, with a little help from social media-savvy NASA, has continued to tweet up a storm about its Martian adventure ever since.

I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity)

6. October 29, 2012: Superstorm Sandy's Havoc Captured On (Mobile) Camera

When it comes to natural disasters, the scope of devastation can often only be expressed through images. As Hurricane Sandy barreled into the East Coast, Instagram conveyed the vast damage in real-time as the rest of the nation watched on and waited. Sandy was Instagram's biggest moment to date - according to CEO Kevin Systrom, at its peak, users were uploading 10 Sandy-related images per second. 

7. Citizen Journalism Keeps Its Steam In Syria And Egypt

Embattled countries in the Middle East found a global voice in 2011 on sites like Twitter and Facebook, and that momentum carried well into 2012. In Syria, activists turned citizen journalists disseminated news and images of the ongoing conflict with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's violently oppressive government -- even into a nationwide Internet blackout. In June, Egyptians followed the first election of the post-Mubarak era on Twitter with bated breath. And in November, both the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas weaponized tweets and blog entries into an escalating social media branding war as tensions hit a fever pitch. 

8. November 2012: Presidential Election Smashes Twitter Records

The 2012 U.S. Presidential election saw people bleeding red and blue on social networks in droves. But the spikes of activity stirred up during the party conventions and the debates between candidates were nothing compared to the election night surge. Obama's simple victory tweet, attached to a picture of the second-term President and the First Lady, smashed retweet records and has since been shared over 800,000 times. On election night, Twitter-goers set a frenzied record of 327,452 tweets per minute with over 31 million sent over the course of the day. Whoa. 

Want more year-end nostalgia, packaged up all nice? Check out the 2012 retrospectives published by Facebook, Twitter and Google. 

New analytics from AppData suggest that Instagram is hemorrhaging members after last week's backlash against its changing terms of use. Some sites are reporting that Instagram has actually lost 25% of its daily active users as a result of the incident, which had Instagram enthusiasts and the Facebook-wary alike hoisting their pitchforks in protest. 

The New York Post reports:

"The app, which Facebook acquired for $1 billion earlier this year, may have shed nearly a quarter of its daily active users in the wake of the debacle, according to figures from AppData."

While Instagram wasn't willing to divulge statistics to the contrary when we reached out for comment, it did dismiss the AppData numbers altogether. According to a company representative, "This data is inaccurate. We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram."

But in light of Instagram's nimble PR recovery and a host of other uncontrolled variables, the 25% figure is just an bad read on some out-of-context statistics. Here's why.

AppData's Imperfect Instagram Sample 

For starters, AppData's numbers only reflect the behavior of Instagram users who have tied their accounts to Facebook. According to AppData's disclaimer, "only users who connect to the app using Facebook are included in the active user counts." This April, that accounted for a 20% sample of Instagram's total user base, up from 15% in 2011.

While 20% is by no means small, it represents Instagram users' behavior in relation to Facebook. Considering that the blow-up last week revolved around Facebook's mobile advertising plans, that's a big variable. Instagram loyalists are happy to blame Facebook for any of the app's missteps anyway, and it's possible that the whole ordeal had users snipping their Facebook ties rather than jumping ship altogether. Instagram users who connect through Facebook are arguably the most volatile subgroup of its over 100 million users. 

Blame The Holidays, Not The Backlash

Interestingly, according to AppData, Instagram's numbers actually remained level during the ToS debacle, which began unfolding on Dec. 17 and reached a fever pitch the next day. Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom apologized and rolled back the proposed policy change on Dec. 20. Instagram actually saw an increase in DAU from 16.2 million to 16.4 million between Dec. 18 and 19. The decline to 12.4 million began on Dec. 23, which began to sink from a baseline of 15.7 million, with a sharper drop on Christmas Eve.

Compared to the apparent effect of the Christmas holiday, Instagram's ToS kerfuffle appears to have had little measurable impact on AppData's numbers. And according to the data, monthly active use numbers are up 600,000 today from yesterday. Weekly active users are up 29.4 million today from 28.5 on Dec. 27.

A Complicated Year For Instagram

The holiday 2011 season was good to Instagram, though those were considerably simpler times. Last year around this time, Instagram saw explosive growth as both iPhone 4S activations and its new title as Apple's official "iPhone App of the Year" fueled its trend to the top. As CEO Kevin Systrom told Gigagom: "Coupled with being iPhone App of the Year – new activations of iPhones on Christmas definitely gave Instagram a bump, though we’re not releasing publicly how much of a bump. Sorry I can’t be more specific, but things are going well!" 

As Buzzfeed suggests, to really examine the fallout of Instagram's policy debacle, one would be better served to look at Flickr's numbers from last week (we requested as much from Yahoo! last week but received a link to a company blog post instead). But even if Flickr saw a spike in growth, the two services aren't mutually exclusive. Not to mention that Instagram can add new users faster than it might lose old ones. 

Shares of Facebook stock were down 1.46% percent this morning, opening at $25.29 before inching upward over the course of the day. While this year has seen more ups and downs for the hit photo sharing app - from its billion dollar acquisition to its ever-increasing user numbers - it's still overwhelmingly on the up and up. 

The Web has spoken. And it wants your paws off of its little-square-filtered-photos, thank you very much.

In response to a tidal wave of backlash among users, Instagram has rolled back the portion of its new Terms of Service agreement that pertains to advertising. Instagram users seized on the section's language, interpreting it to mean that the company would leverage user photos in future ad partnerships.

In a blog post Thursday night, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom clarified the issue in plain language: "Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos – you do."  

Then, in a new blog entry perhaps designed to change the subject, Instagram announced an update to its just-updated Android and iOS app that makes a number of minor improvements and adds a brand new filter - Mayfair.

More on that later - the big question is whether the ToS backtrack means Instagram is really out of the woods?

Meet The New Boss (Same As The Old Boss)

Instagram's new policy around advertising is its old policy, which has been in effect since October 2010. The proposed language, which prompted the backlash, is as follows: 

"Some of the Service is supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions, and you hereby agree that Instagram may place such advertising and promotions on the Service or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you. You acknowledge that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such."

The original/reinstated policy is this: 

A friend of mine who worked at Microsoft during its glory days once confided to me that Microsoft's success in the 1990s came in part because Microsoft had been blessed with such wonderful enemies. It's not that Microsoft was so brilliant, he said, but that everyone else was just so incredibly awful.

Same goes today for Vic Gundotra and his team at Google+. Here they are, building a social network that gets bigger and better every day, while their biggest rivals, Facebook and Instagram, keep planting land mines around themselves and then stepping on them.

The latest example is this uproar over changes Instagram made to its terms of service, which maybe gives Instagram permission to use your photos in ads, or maybe not, but anyway, everyone panic, it's a trap!

Instagram Backpedals

Everyone freaked out, so yesterday Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom issued a backpedaling blog post that said, basically, Um, no, you guys all misunderstood what we're planning to do, and we need to fix the language in our statement, and we're totally not going to sell your photos to advertisers, we're just saying that we have a license to license them to advertisers, which is not the same as selling them, so we're totally not lying, right? Although yeah, maybe, like, we might, um, someday use your photos in some new kind of advertising or brand promotion that we're hoping to experiment with or something, but as of right now we don't have any intention to do whatever it is you're afraid that we might do, at least as far as we know at this very minute as I am sitting here writing these words, though that could change in the future. So, we good?

This is a classic Facebook-style response, the non-apology apology combined with non-admission admission, where you try to sound contrite and you fire out a lot of words and hope that everybody just gets more confused and nobody notices that you didn't actually say that you're not going to do the thing that people are worried you might do. My sense is that Systrom sold his company to Facebook and now is waking up realizing the kind of people he's actually leapt into bed with, and maybe it is also dawning on him that these guys now own him and can tell him what to do, and maybe he even regrets this turn of events, but several hundred million dollars has a way of assuaging that pain.

The Anti-Backlash Backlash

The anti-Instagram backlash of course prompted an anti-backlash backlash, as the usual lineup of Silicon Valley apologist bloggers (apolo-bloggers?) rushed out to defend Systrom and Instagram, arguing that everyone was just being ridiculous and freaking out for no reason because Instagram isn't doing anything bad here, and the new terms aren't any different from the old terms, and everybody just needs to sit down and read the legal documents, or just trust Instagram and Facebook, because why not? Look at their track record. Good people.

But if the new terms aren't any different from the old terms, why did Instagram and its lawyers feel the need to create new terms? Does anyone believe that big publicly traded companies suddenly start adding new wording to their terms of service just for no reason? Just for giggles? Just to piss people off and send users into a panic? 

Who knows. I am not a lawyer, as folks online like to say. 

What I do know is that I'm not going to pore through the legalese of the new document and compare it to the wording of the old document and then try to parse the meaning of the different wording, because frankly I don't have time to wade through legal forms, and I don't think I should need a law degree to stay on top of the constantly changing terms of service of an app that lets me share photos with kooky old-timey filters on them, especially since I'm married and I have kids and a job and a mortgage and loads of things that are far more central to my existence than worrying about (or using) Instagram.

The takeaway for most people will be that Instagram made some changes, and the changes seemed skeevy, and not just to the unwashed masses but even to companies like National Geographic, which has stopped posting photos on Instagram and presumably did so on the advice of its own lawyers, who no doubt understand terms of service statements better than the average tech blogger.

Whatever Facebook does or doesn't plan to do with people's photos, the damage is done. If you needed another reason not to bother with Instagram, Facebook just gave it to you.

What's more surprising is the fact that people seem so surprised and disappointed -- and even kind of hurt -- to discover that Instagram isn't some well-meaning charity organization but is in fact just another grubby Internet business. How does anyone not know, at this point, that the people who are offering all these "free services" on the Internet are not a pack of heroic, idealistic entrepreneurs but are in fact just a bunch of icky businesskids whose idea of "changing the world" means tricking people into parting with data that can be turned into money?

It's 2012, people. Time to let the scales fall from your eyes.

The Exodus Begins

Now people are bailing out of Instagram, among them my colleague Jon Mitchell, an avid Instagrammer who says he's quitting because "it's not inspiring anymore." Our writer John Paul Titlow points out that Instagram also is alienating professional photographers.

How great is this for Google+? Photographers are one of the key consituencies and were among the service's earliest and most avid adopters. Photographer Thomas Hawk touted the virtues of Flickr and Google+ in his blog post expressing his dismay over the Instagram debacle. 

Some photographers love Google+ so much they even organized an "Unofficial Google+ Photographers Conference" earlier this year. Now even more of them have a reason to switch to Google+. And what can Instagram do to lure them back?

Facebook and Instagram are in a tough position. The only way they can make money is by doing things that members don't want them to do, things that, in ways big and small, diminish the experience of being on Facebook and Instagram.

So they must choose between advertisers and members, and so far -- I know this is shocking -- they keep siding with the ones who give them money.

The problem is that this strategy seems guaranteed to drive away members, which in turn drives away advertisers, which means it all ends in a blackened pit of fire and smoke, but by then, if you're clever, you've dumped your shares onto the suckers, made your millions (or billions) and moved on.

Google Doesn't Need To Put Ads On Google+

Google+ has no such issues. Gundotra and his team don't need to place ads next to, or inside, the news feed of Google+. They don't need to run sponsored stories and promoted posts and all the other garbage that increasingly clutters up Facebook. They also don't need to grab your photos and make money off them by using them in ads.

Google makes money from Google+ by using social results in its core search business. Who knows how much money, and really, who cares? Google could run Google+ as a charity, and whatever the whole things costs it would still be a rounding error to a company that will do $40 billion in sales this year and throw off $10 billion in net profit. I'd guess Larry Page would do it just for giggles, let alone for the chance to hurt Facebook, which has talked so much smack about unseating Google.

So what does this mean? It means Google+ guys can take the high road.

It means Vic Gundotra can wait for Facebook and Instagram to keep doing dumb things, then put out a high-minded statement like the one I got from Google: "As our Terms of Service make clear, ‘what belongs to you stays yours.’ You own your files and control their sharing, plain and simple. Some of our services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In addition, on Google+ you can export your photos and other data whenever you'd like."

It means Bradley Horowitz can get up on stage at the unofficial photographers conference and strike a Jesus Christ pose (seriously, check out the photo on that link) and say that Google's goal is simply "building a product for humanity." 

It means Google can just keep its head down, keep adding features, keep not running ads, and watch in glee as Facebook and Instagram keep pissing off people by trying to make money off their personal information and photos. Vic Gundotra would never say this, but I'm sure he's happy today.

The holidays may have come early for Yahoo this year... assuming that the company is paying attention.

Just last week I noted that if Facebook makes a misstep with its biggest acquisition to date, Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service is perfectly positioned to welcome a mass exodus of Instagram users. That seems to be happening right now as an update to Instagram's Terms of Service has many Instagrammers up in arms.

See Jon Mitchell's Why I Quit Instagram And Am Moving To Flickr

See John Paul Titlow's Facebook Poisons Instagram For Its Most Valuable Users: Real Photographers

The text of the update, which appeared at the top of my Instagram feed on Monday, is available in full on Instagram's blog. Want the Cliff's Notes? Facebook will be pumping ads into Instagram and your photos are fair game:

"Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you. If you are under the age of eighteen (18), or under any other applicable age of majority, you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to this provision (and the use of your name, likeness, username, and/or photos (along with any associated metadata)) on your behalf."

The new Instagram terms go into effect January 16th. 

So what's the problem? People don't trust Facebook. In spite of inching toward transparency, the social network is so big (and so slippery, historically) that many members are suspicious of its motives. When Facebook bought Instagram last spring, the consensus was that the deal was an expensive way to neuter an emergent threat. But the boost to Facebook's Like-worthiness could have been just as valuable, assuming the social behemoth didn't fumble its biggest acquisition. 

Enter Instagram, an extremely well-loved app - especially considering its age. And for a while Facebook treated its shiny new toy with kid gloves. The company swore up and down that the beloved mobile-only service would maintain its autonomy from the world's biggest social network. Facebook tread carefully to avoid upsetting the big new brand under its wing.

Until this week, that is. 

If Facebook breaks Instagram, users won't hate only the implementation of ads and the monetization of their content without payment; they'll loathe the brand that made their favorite app un-fun. "Ugh, Facebook ruins everything," they'll huff about the new ToS.

Yahoo's Flickr Moment?

Hey, Yahoo... you're writing all of this down, right? It's go-time if you want to take advantage of the newly bubbling discontent with Instagram. But you've got to be pro-active.

Slash Flickr Pro membership prices, blast some sassy remarks across social channels... whatever it takes. You just launched a great mobile update. People want a photo sharing service they can trust - or maybe even just one that isn't bound up in Facebook. Instagram's wave of social photogs might be ready to flee the app for greener, more trustworthy pastures - and they're looking for a pied piper. Now is your chance to make sure Flickr is that place.

Ready to make the jump yourself? Services like Instaport and OpenPhoto let you download your Instagram photos in one fell swoop so you can batch upload them to Flickr. Godpseed!

I'm going to keep using Instagram. But I can understand why some folks, especially professional photographers, may leave.

The service's recent terms-of-service update trouble me greatly, but it's not quite a deal-killer for me as an amateur photographer. Plus, I'm hopeful that, after today's massive backlash, the company will rethink the wording of its new policy. If not, Instagram is about to get noticeably crappier. 

Under the new policy, Instagram is free to license photos to third parties without paying the users who created them. The shift paves the way for Facebook to get a return on its huge investment by monetizing Instagram. That's something the company has every right to do, but how it's going about the process - and the degree to which it appears to infringe on users' intellectual property rights - has sparked an enormous backlash and a deluge of "I quit!" rage tweets (see ReadWrite's Jon Mitchell on Why I Quit Instagram And Am Moving To Flickr). Even Anderson Cooper is pissed. 

When Facebook bought Instagram last year, everybody worried that the giant social network would ruin the photo sharing service. I thought that was an overreaction. Maybe I was wrong. If Instagram doesn't reverse course, this move could water down the experience - and hurt Instagram's growth and engagement metrics. 

Are millions of people really going to quit Instagram? Probably not. The service's absurdly rapid growth might slow down a bit, but those trend lines will keep heading north.

Instagram Hinges On Quality, Believe It Or Not

In response to today's news, lots of people are making the same joke: Do they really think they're going to make money from filtered photos of my lunch? LOL. Sure, there's a lot of garbage on Instagram (just as there is on Twitter and Tumbler), but there are also a lot of really high-quality, beautifully composed photographs. As social networks go, Instagram's user experience is uniquely hinged on the quality of the content published on it. The company knows this. Just look at the company blog. 

But even if 98% of Instagram users stay put, those who stick around will probably see a drop in the quality images. That's because the people most likely to jump ship are the people producing the best content: serious photographers.  

And who can blame them? People who make a living taking photographs already face a daunting landscape in the age of Google Image Search and stock photography. Many photojournalists and other pros had trouble warming up to Instagram in the first place, assuaged only by its rapid rise and guarantee of a sizable audience. It's a great marketing tool for photographers, but ceases to be worth it once Instagram starts monetizing their work without compensating them. 

I use Instagram constantly. Its icon occupies one of four coveted slots on my iPhone's dock and I open it almost as much as I open Twitter, and certainly more than Facebook. I use it to take and share photos, but most of the time I spend with Instagram is spent looking at images. Of all the photos I see everyday, most of my favorite ones come from people whose job it is to see, frame and snap good photos. Yes, tools like Instagram democratize photography and amateurs can produce some amazing work. But the most jaw-dropping things I see on Instagram come from newspaper photographers, documentarians and other pros. 

Neal Santos is an unbelievably good photographer. The Philadelphia-based photojournalist recently landed on Instagram's suggested user list, leading to thousands of new followers. Today, he has more than 18,000 Instagram followers, which is a promotional goldmine for somebody who makes images for a living. But Santos is now considering deleting his account.

"It's crazy to me how their blog features stunning photographs from professionals and artists who take time and put out high quality content," says Santos. "Their featured users list always has incredible working photographers listed."

It's precisely those hard-working, high-quality content-producing users - such as Santos himself - that Instagram stands to lose as a result of this change.

If that happens, everyone on Instagram is going to see a lot less of the "beautiful, original content" that Instagram is supposedly all about. The amateur food porn, on the other hand, will keep coming. 

UPDATE: Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom responded to the outcry by attempting to clarify the company's intended approach to advertising ("We do not have plans" to use photos in advertisements) the selling of photos ("It is not our intention to sell your photos") and intellectual property ("Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos.") Systrom says they plan on updating the language of their terms to better reflect this. It remains to be seen if Instagram's first Facebook-style policy change freakout will have any impact on their usage. 

I never thought I'd do this, but I quit Instagram yesterday.

It wasn't Instagram's new terms of service and privacy policy, though those are terrible. I don't relish the idea of my friends' faces and data being sold for advertising, but it happens all the time already. No, if I rage-quit social networks for reasons like that, I'd have been offline since they let high school kids onto Facebook. I live my life online as though I'm freely making stuff for other people to sell. It's fun. Who cares?

Of course, I do it with the explicit knowledge that I'm doing so. I don't post things I don't want to be publicly available. People who don't realize what's going on are screwed. So don't get me wrong, I am utterly disappointed in the businesses chosen by the dominant Web companies.

But I quit Instagram for another reason. It's going to sound pretentious, but I really don't mean it that way. I grew out of it.

Out Of The Box

I didn't take photos before I had a smartphone, and I wasn't a photographer before I got Instagram. I didn't know where to look, how to frame, or where to gather the light. I was incapable of using a camera.

But through the amazingly simple mechanisms of Instagram, I was able to get software assistance for my shots and human feedback on my choices. Instagram taught me everything. It taught me to care about photos.

And now I do care, and I look at these little low-quality, brown-shifted boxes, and they look so much more boring than the wild visions in my mind.

Add on to that the fact that any free social network will eventually be covered in unsightly ads, and you see why I quit Instagram. It's not inspiring anymore.

As John Paul Titlow just wrote, Instagram will surely survive these changes, but it might be worse off for it. Avid photographers are not feeling it anymore.

The Social Network

I went to Flickr. I'd never used it before. Like I said, I never really took a photo until Instagram came along, and many people trace the downfall of Flickr to precisely that moment.

But Facebook played the other part in that. That was the social shoebox for photos when I got started. Flickr was still around, but when Facebook added photos, my start-up cost fell to zero. Facebook was the first social Web product I ever really used. It was a generational thing.

So when Instagram sold to Facebook, I was thrilled. It seemed like such a natural combination. I'd have a full-featured one-stop shop for sharing my photos with the people in them. Alas, the novelty wore off.

And then Flickr released that new app right before Instagram released that new policy, and I realized what I had to do.

I wanted all my photos on the Web in the highest quality. I wanted to be able to share them or keep them private as needed. I wanted to control the rights around their use. I wanted to be able to take more pictures, upload them, organize them and talk about them while mobile, but I also wanted a full-featured big-screen interface when I was at my computer. And I was happy to pay an established company, Yahoo, to provide the service, so I could be sure it would keep working.

That's why, along with dozens of people in my networks, I joined Flickr yesterday, and we found tons of old friends there waiting, happy to see us.

Lead image via Flickr Commons.

Love applying moody effects to your iPhone photos? Well, you're in luck - after this week, you can do that on just about every image app you've ever downloaded. In the latest lap of the overwrought social media arms race, Twitter and Flickr have updated their mobile apps to offer photo filters, just like good ol' Instagram. 

Filters are the supposed key ingredient in Instagram’s wildly successful recipe, but for companies like Flickr, obsessing over them is missing the other important lessons of the $1 billion app. 

Yahoo's Best-Loved Product

Flickr was perfectly poised to be the social photo sharing app when Yahoo fell asleep at the wheel back in 2005. Amazingly, in spite of its failure to evolve, Flickr has managed to hang in there, often losing users, but never hemorrhaging them. It remains Yahoo's best-loved product, one so nostalgia-inducing that a site begging Yahoo's new CEO to fix it went viral earlier this year. 

In this rare instance, Yahoo might be well-served to play up the Yahoo-ness of one of its products. The company should position its photo network as the perfect alternative for folks nervous about Instagram's ever-deepening Facebook ties. If Facebook ends up fumbling Instagram, whether through a poor branding choice or a privacy flare-up, Flickr could be right there to pick up the slack. 

Flickr's Slow Decline

Though its enthusiastic core remains, Flickr's traffic has been on a slow decline for some time now. Still, it's hard to tell exactly how poorly Flickr is doing. Yahoo reported that the site had 51 million registered members in June 2011 and hasn't publicly offered those numbers since.

The company reports that more than 8 billion photos have been uploaded to its database, after topping 7 billion in June. That metric is a little slippery, though. It obviously can't be compared to Instagram's 1 billion total photo uploads, since Flickr users often batch upload via the Web, while adding a photo to Instagram is a one-at-a-time manual/mobile process. 

The Anti-Instagram?

Flickr doesn't need to swipe Instagram's filters to assert itself as a social photo hub - it still is a social photo hub. And Flickr’s mobile strategy is way too late to stave off the other app's rise. But Flickr isn't anything like Instagram, and it doesn’t need to be. Still, Yahoo's tarnished crown jewel could learn a thing or two from the app that stole its thunder. 

First of all, Like Reddit or any other social site with a rabid fan base, Flickr can intimidate new users. As a member who was late to the game, joining Flickr in 2009 or so, the site's network, menus and features can seem prohibitively complicated. Its thriving, enthusiastic communities are great, but they seem so well established that I never really knew where to get started. After signing up, I felt like the new kid in the cafeteria. Sure I sat down, plunking a few hundred photos in my feed, but I never felt at home.

A Delicate Balance Of Old And New

To attract new users, Flickr needs to create an inviting environment for beginners without alienating its long-time members - no easy task. The new mobile app is a great step in that direction, with a robust set of sharing and editing features that could please old and new users alike.

The core Web experience needs its (many) cobwebs dusted off too. Unlike simple, single-purpose Instagram, Flickr is glutted with features, from EXIF data to bustling communities and tags as far as the eye can see. It can't just dump that stuff, but it should make note of the sparse elegance that makes Instagram thrive. Instagram does one thing very, very well - Flickr needs to figure out what its thing is and make that very clear to everyone. 

Less Is More

Flickr announced a preliminary redesign on Wednesday, but the site needs a lot more work than a new navigation bar. Getting around on Flickr is clunky at best: useful features are buried in labyrinthine nested menus. Last year, one of Flickr's own designers even published a scathing critique of how the site's design could be yet another nail in its coffin. In a now-removed blog post, designer Timoni West took "the most important page on Flickr" to task: 

"The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.

The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don’t come back."

Not A Zero-Sum Game

As social networks obsessively imitate one another, they risk diluting the uniqueness that makes them relevant in the first place. Sure, Flickr thew photo filters into the mix to cover its bases. But if you’re Flickr, you’ve already got a community built around doing photographic things that don’t involve applying special effects to little square photos. 

If Instagram is for anyone with a smartphone camera, Flickr is for photographers. Thanks to the rise of Instagram, that distinction is blurrier than ever - and Flickr can leverage the surge of interest in social photo sharing if it plays its cards right. Instagram is the gateway drug of social photography. Now that it has an excellent mobile app at its disposal, Flickr feels like the real stuff.

Lead image courtesy of Flickr's blog.

In the most shocking coincidence in all tech history, Twitter updated its apps with its rumored photo filters on the same day that Instagram 3.2 came out with an improved camera and new filters. This is really boring news. There is only one thing that's interesting about the Blurry Photo War, and this is as good a time as any to mention it.

Twitter and Instagram have been fighting. Instagram sold to Facebook instead of Twitter, so Twitter cut off Instagram's access to Twitter followers, so Instagram cut off photo sharing in Twitter Cards, so Twitter partnered up with Aviary and put photo filters in its own apps. This is terrible consumer tech drudgery that doesn't help anyone. But there is still one grain of interesting social media theory left.

There is one very good reason to keep using Instagram instead of (or in addition to) Twitter's camera. Twitter is a general-interest place. People on Twitter are willing to listen to whatever's happening out in the world right now. Some of them might not care about your photos at all.

Because Instagram has a singular focus on photos, it's a more appreciative environment for sharing them. The reason it's still so popular despite the ascendance of Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+ is because of this focus. All those social networks are for broader purposes than just posting photos. People use them for all kinds of things. Instagram is just for Instagram fans.

It has been said that Flickr should have been Instagram. It was the most beloved photo-driven social network before the mobile age, and it got beaten. 500px is on the rise as a social network for eye-popping pro photographers. But Instagram is a jewel. Even though Facebook bought it and built its own iOS camera app with filters and all, it hasn't touched a hair on Instagram's head. Twitter will surely get some play out of its photo filters, but for people who actually care about sharing photos, Instagram is still the place to be.

Today's Instagram update adds a new filter and a better shooting mode. It improves the depth of field rendering for tilt shift, and it speeds up the app. Instagram has always made the case for a photo-only social network, and Twitter couldn't and shouldn't replace that.

Instagram and Twitter have had a falling out, as ReadWrite's Jon Mitchell reported recently. In case you missed the latest Silicon Valley kerfuffle, the gist is that Instagram won’t let you view your photos on Twitter anymore and instead now forces you to leave Twitter and go look at them on Instagram. Instagram says Twitter started it. Twitter says Instagram started it.

Michael Arrington blasts them both, saying they’re putting themselves ahead of their members. True enough, but Arrington misses the larger point.

The real problem is not that the people running these companies are greedy, selfish and childish (though they are). The real problem is that they are behaving in a completely rational way given the Web 2.0 business model, which ultimately makes this kind of exploitation inevitable.

Companies like Twitter and Instagram (and Facebook, which owns Instagram) are set up in such a way that their interests have never been aligned with the interest of their users, but in fact are in complete opposition to them.

Blame The Business Model

The only way these companies can succeed financially is by tricking members and forcing them into walled gardens. Think of it this way - there’s a reason that they don't hold a circus out in the open, and instead put it under a tent - and it’s not to keep you dry in case of rain.

Sure, some companies start out pretending to be all open and inclusive. That’s only because they need to ride on the backs of other services in order to attain sufficient scale. Once they’re big enough, they begin cutting off those connections, rounding up users, claiming ownership of your data and so on.

Twitter grew huge thanks to the work of lots of small partners who built Twitter add-ons. But once Twitter needed to make money, the partners got it in the neck. You might call this evil, but it is what Twitter needed to do.

Of course this stinks for users. But it’s naive to expect these companies to do anything else.

Arrington lashes into Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, but if you’re Systrom, you’ve got to satisfy different stakeholders with divergent interests. You have investors, who want the biggest possible return in the shortest possible time. And you have users, who want as many features and as much interoperability as possible, at zero cost.

Which group do you think gets priority - the one that gave you millions of dollars to build your business, or the one that wants everything but doesn’t want to pay?

Arrington says screwing users is short-sighted, and that a smart company would “treat users with respect and make sure that your product does everything it can to delight and amaze.” A company that did this would build “a hundred year brand,” he says.

I’m sure he means this, so apparently there is at least one investor in Silicon Valley who believes that outfits like Instagram might be around in 100 years because our cyborg descendants will be as fascinated by old-fashioned photo filters as we are.

All the other venture capitalists, however, seem to operate under the (far more realistic) belief that this could all be over at any minute and you should grab as much as you can get while you still can. These are not long-distance thinkers. Heck, Facebook took heat for making its investors wait eight whole years to cash out in an IPO.

Wishful, Magical Thinking 

As for this pipe dream about a magical utopian Web where serivces all interoperate and everything is wonderfully mashed-up and interoperable, well, that was a nice idea that some people had in the early days of Web 2.0.

But anyone who thought about it could see that this was never going to happen, especially if we also insisted on getting everything free. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.

The dream was rubbish, a big lie that was sold to us along with the one about “changing the world,” and the one about “a world that is more open and connected is a better world.”

That last one comes from Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, the same Mark Zuckerberg whose company doesn’t let users control their own data, and whose company owns Instagram, which just cut off connections to Twitter. The one that from the beginning has been a roach motel, a place where data goes in and doesn’t come out.

Then Again, We Could Just Pay

One solution - of course - would be for us to pay for these services, so that companies providing them didn’t need to screw us to stay alive.

As Jon Mitchell has pointed out, App.net is trying something like that.

But let’s be honest. We’ve all been trained to expect stuff free. And most of these services are not compelling enough that many people would pay for them. Sure, they’re fun, but if Facebook suddenly demanded $10 a month, how many of its billion users would still be around six months later? And that’s an app that most of us feel we can’t live without. The others would be gone in six minutes.

I know it's fun to get angry at tech companies when they screw us over. But whose fault is it, really, when we end up getting tricked and exploited and treated like crap by companies we thought were our friends? Look in the mirror.